Swapping PS3 Hard drive ?

Moonpie2

Moonpie2

Moonpie2

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Are we allowed to talk about this in here ?

Although technically its modding, its only increasing storage capacity so not really on the illegal side of things.

Just thought I'd ask to clear that up before posting me question :)
 
Awesome !!

Just a quickie.

It doesn't matter if its a 5400rpm or a 7200rpm does it ?
Also there are a SATA 300 and SATA 150 standards, does this matter ?
 
Moonpie2 said:
Awesome !!

Just a quickie.

It doesn't matter if its a 5400rpm or a 7200rpm does it ?
Also there are a SATA 300 and SATA 150 standards, does this matter ?
Click to expand...

The SATA 300/150 won't matter. With regards to rpm, the default PS3 drives are 5400rpm. People have successfully put 7200rpm drives in (same form factor etc). Some claim they cause overheating as they spin faster etc. Some claim games load/install faster. Both valid logical extensions of using a faster drive, neither of which I have tested. I think most people here have put in 5400rpm drives just to play it safe tbh.


rp2000
 
ScarySquirrel said:
Is there a list of Hard Drives which are known to 100% work? What would you recommend?

How do you transfer over game saves and system settings?
Click to expand...

Any 5400 rpm SATA 2.5 inch drive is compatible. There is a large amount of people on this forum who have upgraded theirs and they have used a mixture of drives. Off the top of my head I have a 320gb Samsung Spinpoint. I would recommend you get the cheapest drive in the capacity of your choice tbh. Mine was the cheapest 320gb laptop drive around at the time (cost £70)

I have no real loyalty with laptop HDDs to be honest as no-one can tell me they have used enough different ones personally to judge a particular brand breaks more than others etc.


rp2000
 
rp2000 said:
Any 5400 rpm SATA 2.5 inch drive is compatible. There is a large amount of people on this forum who have upgraded theirs and they have used a mixture of drives. Off the top of my head I have a 320gb Samsung Spinpoint. I would recommend you get the cheapest drive in the capacity of your choice tbh. Mine was the cheapest 320gb laptop drive around at the time (cost £70)

I have no real loyalty with laptop HDDs to be honest as no-one can tell me they have used enough different ones personally to judge a particular brand breaks more than others etc.


rp2000
Click to expand...

Cool thanks mate. How did you go about transferring your bits and bobs across to the new HDD?
 
ScarySquirrel said:
Cool thanks mate. How did you go about transferring your bits and bobs across to the new HDD?
Click to expand...

Ah forgot to answer that bit!! There is a built in "backup utilty" in the XMB of the PS3. It transfers all data to a USB external FAT32 formatted HDD/USB key.

I am sure I made a note in an old thread but the backup took close to 1 hour on my 70% full 60GB drive, and then the same time to restore it to the new 320gb once I swapped disks. I can only assume it is encrypting the drives as well as copying them to the external device.

I cancelled halfway through and deleted all my video files, and it still took 1 hour to backup, so you may as well leave all content and let it do it's thing in its own time.

The utility backs up games, music, videos, saves, game data. Basically everything apart from the user profiles which are stored in some sort of FLASH memory on the PS3.


rp2000
 
rp2000 said:
Ah forgot to answer that bit!! There is a built in "backup utilty" in the XMB of the PS3. It transfers all data to a USB external FAT32 formatted HDD/USB key.

I am sure I made a note in an old thread but the backup took close to 1 hour on my 70% full 60GB drive, and then the same time to restore it to the new 320gb once I swapped disks. I can only assume it is encrypting the drives as well as copying them to the external device.

I cancelled halfway through and deleted all my video files, and it still took 1 hour to backup, so you may as well leave all content and let it do it's thing in its own time.

The utility backs up games, music, videos, saves, game data. Basically everything apart from the user profiles which are stored in some sort of FLASH memory on the PS3.


rp2000
Click to expand...

Awesome, it is good to see they made it as easy to do as possible :)

Thanks for your help rp.
 
edit: less mad raving.

The backup/restore utility was really flaky when I used it, but as long as you are keeping your original hdd you can just swap it back in and do another backup (or copy save games etc. off manually and start from scratch otherwise) if it goes wrong.
 
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Sareth said:
edit: less mad raving.

The backup/restore utility was really flaky when I used it, but as long as you are keeping your original hdd you can just swap it back in and do another backup (or copy save games etc. off manually and start from scratch otherwise) if it goes wrong.
Click to expand...

Given the convoluted method you used to swap the drives over, and that I've not heard of anyone else having a problem when doing it, I'll keep my confidence in it working.
 
Memphis said:
Given the convoluted method you used to swap the drives over, and that I've not heard of anyone else having a problem when doing it, I'll keep my confidence in it working.
Click to expand...

I didn't use the convoluted method in the end because of my suspicions of the quality of the backups and it is a good job I didn't.
 
El_Watcher said:
Does anyone know of anyone who has tried one of the SSD drives, to see if the loading times improve?
Click to expand...

I did read an article on it, might have been on gamespot. They reported that loading times were slightly reduced, but writing times nearly doubled.

When I transferred my hard drives, I stuck all my game saves on a memory stick by copying them. As long as you don't have to many, I think this is a better way than the back up utility.

If you don't mind re-downloading and installing stuff that is. :)
 
El_Watcher said:
Does anyone know of anyone who has tried one of the SSD drives, to see if the loading times improve?
Click to expand...

As said, Gamespot did a review a while back. Results are exactly as you'd expect, installation times when writing to the disk went up but loading times reading from the disk went down.

http://uk.gamespot.com/features/6192258/index.html

GTA4 and Assassins Creed are about 2 minutes longer to install but DMC4 takes 10 minutes longer.
 
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